


Thirteen Thousand One Hundred Forty

by thirty2flavors



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Episode: s06e10 The Girl Who Waited, F/M, Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-13
Updated: 2015-02-13
Packaged: 2018-03-12 06:37:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3347243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thirty2flavors/pseuds/thirty2flavors
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>And on her first day, hours later, she watches through a looking glass as an older version of herself condemns her to decades of isolation in this hospital turned hell.</i>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Stuck in Apalapucia, Amelia Pond's wait begins.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thirteen Thousand One Hundred Forty

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a fic meme for the episode prompt of "The Girl Who Waited".

On her first day, Amy learns she can deactivate two Handbots by pressing their palms together. She learns the temporal engine room is a shelter, the one place in all Apalapucia she can let her guard down without fear of attack.

And on her first day, hours later, she watches through a looking glass as an older version of herself condemns her to decades of isolation in this hospital turned hell.

For five days after that, Amy waits. She hides in the engine room and cries on and off, hoping her future self will be proved wrong. She balls her jacket into a pillow and lays on the cold metal floor, waiting for a salvation that slips further out of reach with each second that passes.

On the seventh day, Amy gives up.

On day thirty-one, she kills her first Handbot. She jams a fireplace poker from the chalet room through the back of its head and watches it slump forward onto the hardwood floor. She pries off its chestplate to wear as armour and fashions a helmet out of a plate from its head and her blouse.

By day seventy-five, Amy has memorized the layout of the facility. She knows when Handbots will appear before they do, and knows by rote the pattern they’ll materialize in. She knows which rooms are easiest to hide in, and which rooms have too much open space. She knows where to find materials - needle and thread, markers, plastics, sheets of metal.

Weapons.  

By day ninety-five, she sets down her katana and takes off her armour only when she’s in the engine room.

By day one hundred twenty-nine, she stops taking it off altogether.

It’s the Interface that starts teaching her engineering, on day two hundred sixty-four. Amy plunders the library as often as she can, sneaking one or two books at a time, lest they weigh her down. She reads only non-fiction, her patience for fantasy and fairytales having long since evaporated, and soon she finds herself collecting scientific texts.

It’s beyond her, at first. Science had never been her strong suit in school, the fiddly details and formulas washing over her like white noise. It required a self-discipline Amy had never cared to demonstrate. She’d liked art, and history, and literature, food for the imagination that stretched beyond the city limits of Leadworth.

But here in Apalapucia it’s science she needs, not stories, and she has all the time in the world. So she asks the Interface for help.

By day nine hundred ninety-seven, she reckons she’s learned more than any A-level could have taught her. She puts her katana through a Handbot’s head and breaks open the blackbox to see how it works.

Her mobile phone becomes a sonic probe on day one thousand, three hundred fifty-eight. It starts working as a sonic probe five days after that. 

It’s not until her seventh year - over two thousand, five hundred days since she was abandoned - that Amy decides to disarm a Handbot. She does it because she wants to know if she can, and because for all the adrenaline of fighting to survive, she still finds herself bored. She chops off its hands and hacks into its blackbox, erasing it from the grid. With painstaking precision she removes every last dart poisoned with medicine, any reserve of sedative or inoculation the Handbot contains. She drags it to the engine room with the intent to experiment and surprises even herself by drawing a goofy, cartoonish smile on its face instead.

She spends the next three days reprogramming it, ensuring it’s unable to receive or send signals to the main computer, teaching it to obey her and no one else. The AI isn’t remarkable - its voice recognition is limited to relatively few commands, with its fingers removed it lacks dexterity, and for all the modifications Amy can make its personality is limited to basic service droid only. It’s not a Nestene Duplicate, or even a Cyberman.

Still, besides the Interface it’s the only company that hasn’t tried to kill her in over seven years. That’s worth a name, at least.  She folds her arms across her chest and deliberates. Sentimentality is something she shed like snakeskin long ago, a necessary function of survival in Two Streams, but she stares at the hastily-drawn smile on the Handbot’s face and decides this is one battle she can afford to lose.

Finally, Amy Pond settles on a name she hasn’t spoken - has done her best not to even think - for almost two thousand, five hundred days.  
  
She takes a deep breath and says, “Hello, Rory.”


End file.
